4/14/2005

She Gets PAID For This Stuff?

The proprietors of the Hatemongers' Quarterly blog posted an invitation they received for a lecture at the University of Nottingham, which reads in part as follows:

Invitation to the Seminar of Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is Special Professor at the School of Modern Languages of the University of Nottingham for three years.…The programme of the week was established according to the wishes of the students themselves. Generally, in the morning, Luce Irigaray explained some key words or key thoughts of her thinking, from a list drawn up by students:

I've always thought radical feminist philosophers were a bit off their rockers (granted, most philosophers are a bit off their rockers), but this has to take the cake. The primary problem with feminist thought, in my view, is that men supposedly go around constructing vast intellectual edifices in order to fetishize our genitals, or else to suppress women out of some sort of insecurity. Now, I'm willing to grant a certain degree of such behavior, depending on the era and the culture. But most of the time we're too busy hunting, gathering, and killing each other to worry about such things. Seriously, our lives are not spent scheming about how to oppress women!

Based on a few minutes of Googling, it seems that much of Dr. Irigaray's thought is a justification for anti-Westernism, and especially anti-capitalism. Granted that competition seems to be a more male way of doing things, as opposed to cooperation. But it also tends to get better results when used as a basis for an economy. To oppose a system that works, and mitigates a great deal of suffering, just because it is male-centric seems to me to be the worst sort of narcissism. Once you show me that your "placental economy" actually gets results, then we can talk.